The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has shared new information as part of their “Event Report.” This report revealed that it was the Riverbend Nuclear Facility that unexpectedly went offline on May 21. Riverbend is located in Southeast, Louisiana, near the Mississippi River in St Francisville.
Event Reports are a critical transparency tool. Nuclear facilities are required by federal law to report operational incidents, which helps regulators and the public understand what went wrong and how to prevent future incidents. Similar requirements do not exist for natural gas plants—meaning information about issues at those facilities is not accessible to the public. Thanks to this reporting requirement, we now have confirmation of Riverbend’s role in the blackout.
This remains only a piece of the puzzle, as the load shed wasn’t called until May 25. Other factors that forced a 600 MW reduction in demand were at play, and determining those factors will require transparency and accountability from the utilities who own and operate power plants and transmission assets.
We expect our regulators to meet next week at the New Orleans City Council to discuss what happened, how it happened, why, and what we can do in the future to prevent these kinds of events. We’ll share the exact date and time of that meeting when it’s announced. We need our regulators not to just point fingers, but to ask for transparency from the power companies as well as the regional transmission organization. More detailed information is yet to come about how this happened, and we’ll continue to keep this blog updated.
While we are still working to understand what occurred on Sunday afternoon, what is known is as follows:
Louisiana is a part of a multi-state organization called the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO). This independent organization was approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in 2001 for the purpose of coordinating the dispatch of the most affordable power generating resources to meet the demand for electricity across 15 states, and to independently assess the transmission grid for upgrades needed to deliver electricity to consumers more affordably, reliably and efficiently.
In short, MISO is responsible for planning and coordinating generation and transmission of electricity to ensure the lights stay on across its region, spanning from South Louisiana to Canada.
MISO is regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), but it is important to understand that regional transmission organizations (RTO) are fundamentally planning and coordination entities. They look to and work with state and local regulators to understand what is needed at a local level, and to ensure future grid reliability and affordability.
MISO cannot order Louisiana or New Orleans to build transmission lines, but Louisiana and New Orleans regulators can demand that utilities and MISO engage in planning that ensures electricity is distributed across the grid as efficiently, affordably, and reliably as possible – including intervening to prevent major blackouts.
MISO has begun efforts for long term, regional transmission planning, however planning has not happened in MISO South states largely because regulators can not agree on how to split the bill for transmission costs (also known as cost allocation). Our regulators do have the power to demand transmission planning begin as swiftly as possible in MISO South states (AR, LA, MS, and a small portion of TX).
In 2012, to alleviate concerns expressed by the Department of Justice regarding anti-competitive transmission planning and power generation dispatch on behalf of Entergy corporation – MISO integrated Entergy’s service territory covering Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. This established the ‘MISO South’ region, a region that has not benefited from long term, holistic regional transmission planning.
This particular power outage was due to a “load shed event,” which is a last-resort controlled power outage ordered by the Midcontinent System Operator (MISO), the regional grid operator, in order to prevent larger, uncontrolled blackouts. It’s a way to balance supply and demand for our power grid.
The grid works like a highway system, and similar to highway systems, when demands on the road system exceed the number of lanes, they are accompanied by traffic jams (and in this case, blackouts). Without enough “lanes” for electricity to move from producers to customers, “load pockets” are created – which increase costs for consumers and can make the grid more vulnerable to failures. Sunday’s outage was a demonstration of what can go wrong when there is not enough transmission to handle that “traffic.”
Regulators can demand transparency from power companies to understand exactly how the load shed happened. Regulators also indicate to RTOs, in this case, MISO that their constituents need transmission planning, so that when a power plant fails we have adequate transmission lines so that we can access low-cost power in other areas of the grid.
Power companies like Entergy have consistently opposed efforts to connect New Orleans and Louisiana to the larger electric grid, and state and local regulators have often sided with those companies over what’s best for their constituents – which is why the Alliance came into existence. Until regulators engage in regional transmission planning, and order these utilities to fully connect to systems like MISO, Louisiana and New Orleans ratepayers will be vulnerable to failures like we saw on Sunday.
It is important to understand: while MISO can order load shedding to take place to protect the grid, MISO does not decide where load shedding happens. That is a decision made by the local utilities.
We currently do not know how power companies determine which areas experience an outage. Our regulators can demand that power companies share how these decisions are made.
It was a hot day and everyone was using a ton of power to stay cool. But it turns out some power plants were not working properly and there weren't enough power lines to move available energy to where it was needed — so the whole system became overwhelmed and had to be shut down for some folks.
We will provide updates as we learn more about the Memorial Day Weekend outages
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